A user of a user device which is adapted for communication over a permanent (not temporary) communication network may wish to send an information object to a desired destination in a situation where the user device is disconnected from the permanent communication network. A possible situation of disconnection is, for example, a mobile phone the user of which is far off the next base station of a wireless communication network (e.g. according to GSM or UMTS standard) so that no connection between the mobile phone and the base station can be established. This may be the case in a mountainous area, for example. Another situation is, for example, a notebook computer used by a businessman on a journey and no access to the Internet or any other communication network is available at the moment (may be because the businessman has left at home a radio adapter for the notebook computer that otherwise might allow wireless communication of the notebook computer over a wireless communication network). It is clear that a lot more situations of temporary disconnection of a user device from a permanent communication network are conceivable.
A typical information object a user of a user device might wish to transmit is, for example, an SMS message or an e-mail message. Another example of an information object is a software program which might be used by a receiving computer to execute a particular task. Still another example of an information object is a file or a set of data, e.g. measuring data or data resulting from calculations, to be transmitted to a customer or to a coworker.
In case of disconnection from the permanent communication network the user of the user device has the option to wait until communication of his user device over the permanent communication network is possible again. However, this may take a long time, and in some cases too long, e.g. when an urgent message has to be transmitted. Waiting for re-connection to the permanent communication network may not be acceptable then.
From U.S. Pat. No. 5,613,206 A it is known to share a single communication channel of a cellular wireless communication network among a plurality of mobile terminals. The mobile terminals are connected with each other over a wireless ad-hoc subnetwork. One of the mobile terminals acts as a master while the others are slaves within the subnetwork. Whenever a slave wants to use the communication channel it notifies a corresponding request to the master. The master allocates the communication channel to the slaves based upon the incoming requests.
From U.S. Pat. No. 5,970,122 there is known a wireless messaging system which includes a messaging network having a respective user agent for each of a plurality of subscribers. The user agent includes a plurality of messages prestored therein. Each message is allocated to a respective message code. Whenever a subscriber wants to forward a message to a desired receiver, it sends the corresponding message code to its user agent. The user agents expands the received message code to the full message and effects transmission of the expanded message to the desired receiver.